Alberto Blest Gana: 100 Years Later

Patricia Vilches

doi:10.1515/culture-2021-0003

Abstract

Abstract Blest Gana at 100 is a special edition for Open Cultural Studies. Alberto Blest Gana was a Chilean writer who wore many hats during his long life, dying in 1920 at the age of 90. One of the most prominent authors of nineteenth-century Chile and Latin America, he went to military school and later held political and diplomatic appointments, all of which caused him to travel and live abroad. In fact, nel mezzo del cammin of his life, Blest Gana transferred to Europe and eventually settled in Paris, never to return to his country of birth. His fiction and non-fiction conveyed a vast array of experiences and insights from his life in Chile and overseas. To commemorate the 100 years since his death, contributors to Blest Gana at 100 approach his oeuvre from innovative and fresh scholarly angles and thus generate new perspectives on the Chilean author’s most celebrated texts, such as Martín Rivas and El ideal de un calavera. They also examine the early days of his literary career; revisit critical scholarship on Blest Gana from the past; bring less explored texts, such as Mariluán and Los Trasplantados (the latter written and published in Paris) to the foreground; research the background to his work as a columnist and discover the extent to which it informed his literary career; and examine the urban social practices in Blest Gana’s award-winning novel La aritmética en el amor. From these analyses, we hope to foster an ongoing conversation of lively and invigorating Blest Gana scholarship.

Highlights

Chileans had become too accepting of the standards and products of other nations, embracing whatever cultural artefact emanated from Europe, from books and intellectual ideas, to industry, the arts, and commerce (Blest Gana, “Literatura chilena” 81–83)
A search for “Martín Rivas” in the National Curriculum menu on the website of the Chilean Ministry of Education yields more than 50 results (“Recursos educativos”)
Agitated discussions at tertulias [soirees] testify how the Chile of the 1850s was a nation of enemies; this circumstance and status would replicate itself in the 1970s when society again became deeply polarised by the ruptured political ideologies (Constable and Valenzuela 20, 21)

Summary

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Blest Gana at 100 commemorates and contextualises the life and career of Chile’s most prominent nineteenth-century author for an English-speaking audience of specialists and generalists. The major outcome of this battle was the establishment of a “new” conservative order (Sepúlveda 298) In his new country, Cunningham Blest befriended the intellectual and political luminaries of the time and was instrumental in modernising the teaching of medicine in Chile (Hosiasson, “Alberto Blest Gana” 39–40; Silva Castro, Blest Gana, 9–10). Already with La aritmética en el amor, he had established his own demanding premises for fiction writing, “developing a main action intertwined by various secondary actions and bringing to life a large number of characters that would connect with each other” (Poblete Varas 75) He specified that Chileans needed to stop lowering their sights to mediocre goals and instead should advance a “genuine” national project. Chileans had become too accepting of the standards and products of other nations, embracing whatever cultural artefact emanated from Europe, from books and intellectual ideas, to industry, the arts, and commerce (Blest Gana, “Literatura chilena” 81–83)

Martín Rivas and the Chilean Nation

Stages of Authorship

Works Cited